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Blizzard's Titan 'unlikely to be a subscription-based MMORPG'
What's going on with Titan? Only Blizzard knows for sure, and today the gaming giant offered a quick blurb regarding its long-rumored MMORPG during an investor call. "We're in the process of selecting a new direction for the project and re-envisioning what we want the game to be," said Blizz CEO Mike Morhaime. "While we can't talk about the details yet, it is unlikely to be a subscription-based MMORPG."
Blizzard says Titan unlikely to be subscription-based
No, Blizzard still hasn't made an official announcement about what we can expect from their upcoming Titan project -- which we've heard little about since its development was reset back in May. We still don't know much, but in an investor call today Mike Morhaime did say that Titan was "unlikely to be a subscription-based MMORPG." Of course, that still leaves plenty of room to speculate about what Titan actually will be. Will it be a free-to-play MMO or has Titan become something new entirely? With no official release date, only time will tell what Blizzard has in mind.
Activision's Titan probably not a subscription-based MMORPG anymore
Activision Blizzard's secret project, codenamed Titan, is probably not a subscription-based MMORPG anymore, following an assessment of development earlier this year, Activision CEO Mike Morhaime said during a financial call today. "We're in the process of selecting a new direction for the project and re-envisioning what we want the game to be," Morhaime said. "While we can't talk about the details yet, it is unlikely to be a subscription-based MMORPG." During this reset, Activision shifted resources from Titan to other games, such as World of Warcraft and Blizzard All-Stars. There's no release date for Titan, whatever it turns out to be.
Coming soon to a console near you: MMOs
Remember E3 2013? That huge video games conference thing from earlier in the summer? Weeks have passed since Microsoft and Sony squared off in the Los Angeles convention center (while Nintendo posted up at Best Buy and Ouya sulked in the parking lot), but the news made there continues to reverberate through the games industry. One curious trend seems to have been missed amid the clashing of proverbial titans: There sure are a lot of MMOs and online-focused games due on consoles this generation. And since MMOs are the business of Massively, we thought it might be fun to compile a quick list of all the ones we can find that are either already available on our current consoles or set for launch on the next batch. The list, as it turns out, is pretty extensive.
Tianhe-2 supercomputer claims the lead in Top 500 list, thanks its 3.1 million processor cores
As predicted, Chinese supercomputer Tianhe-2 (also known as the Milky Way-2) has now been crowned the most powerful supercomputer in the world. Arriving years ahead of schedule, and packing 32,000 Xeon processors alongside 48,000 Xeon Phi accelerator processors, the supercomputer can manage a quadrillion mathematical calculations per second (33.85 petaflops), double that of last year's king (and closest rival), the Titan. In this year's results, 80 percent of the Top 500 used Intel processors, while 67 percent had processors with eight or more cores -- as clock speeds stall, supercomputer development has now focused on processors running in parallel. Top 500 editor Jack Dongarra adds that "most of the features of the [Tianhe-2] system were developed in China, and they are only using Intel for the main compute part," meaning that you can expect to see more Chinese entrants (and possibly champions) over the next few years. For now, however, the US still claims the majority of the Top 500, with 253 top-ranking supercomputers.
Has Blizzard left an opening for the next generation of WoW killers?
As Blizzard has faltered with its recent loss of WoW subscribers and the reset of its yet to be announced next MMO, other developers, hungry to make inroads in the MMO market, have looked on this as an opportunity. So, after countless games have tried to claim the title, are we really about to see a WoW killer come to market? Stephan Frost, Game Design Producer at NCsoft's Carbine Studios, thinks that it gives his game Wildstar a better chance to succeed. "We're coming out at a time when WoW is losing subscribers and we can fill the void for people who want an MMO that's deep, hardcore but also accessible to people." In the meanwhile, Take-Two Interactive has taken the opposing angle, saying that no one -- not even Blizzard -- can succeed because the North American market is a poor one for MMOs. Analysts agree that Blizzard's delay can only be an opportunity for others, though with WoW's current patch frenzy, it's clear that Blizzard isn't planning on relinquishing its title as top MMO any time soon. So is scifi MMO Wildstar going to be the next big thing? Or will Take-Two's Asian-market MMOs be a smashing success? Only time will tell.
MMOs don't work in the US says Take-Two Interactive
At the Cowen and Company Technology, Media and Telecom Conference this week, Take-Two Interactive's chairman Strauss Zelnick told crowds that MMOs just don't work in North America. "How many MMOs have been successful in the US?" Strauss mused. "Two: World of Warcraft and EverQuest." This is why Take-Two is focusing on Asian markets for its own massively multiplayer games and why, Zelnick suggested (without mentioning anyone by name), Blizzard had to reboot development of their own Project Titan. However, while WoW's numbers have had a much-ballyhooed decline, its current 8.3 million subscribers is nothing to sneeze at. But does America's poor track record with MMOs mean Titan is doomed before it's even managed to get a release date? Zelnick and Take-Two seem fairly certain MMOs don't have a future, but we intend to wait and see.
Editorial: Am I the only one who doesn't care about a delayed video game?
Maybe it's just me, but the news last night that Blizzard delayed Titan a bit has me ... well, not caring. At all. As in I can think of a hundred other things I'd rather do than sit around and listen to a lot of people complain about how it's vaporware or whatever else. I don't mean to be combative here, but I want to raise the point: why do things like this get so much attention in the gaming press? Even for an unannounced title, for which there has been zero official confirmation on any of its details, people seem to be quite cranky about the delay. I can't really wrap my head around it. Is it the fact that Blizzard has been working on this for at least five years? I remember doing Saturn Six Insider three years ago as a little spoof on it all (Saturn's 6th moon is Titan). Since then Blizzard has said nothing new about the project -- this delay only means that they're continuing to work on it and are building it up to be something large and grand. It doesn't mean anything else.
The Queue: Titanic
Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today. Buckle up, y'all. I get a little ranty today. @Atanae asked: How much of a non-issue is the Titan announcement?
Titan Development Reset: Blizzard speaks out
Following the recent news that Blizzard's hotly anticipated MMO, codenamed Project Titan, has been pushed back to 2016, ZAM's Jarimor has reached out to the developers and obtained an official statement. We've always had a highly iterative development process, and the unannounced MMO is no exception. We've come to a point where we need to make some large design and technology changes to the game. We're using this opportunity to shift some of our resources to assist with other projects while the core team adapts our technology and tools to accommodate these new changes. Note that we haven't announced any dates for the MMO. Venturebeat reported that the game's development had been "reset", apparently due to a desire to make technology changes. Purely speculating, of course, but this could be indicative of a change to a new engine, or something along those lines. Rumors have abounded about this secretive project, and a leaked product slate from 2010 indicated that a release would take place in the fourth quarter of 2013. This new information would certainly put paid to that notion, along with other rumors about teaser footage emerging at Blizzcon. The moral of the story is, essentially, that unless you have information directly from the developers, don't pay too much attention to the rumor mill! As WoW Insider's Matthew Rossi commented yesterday, this is nothing new for Blizzard, with similar actions being taken for Warcraft III. We can only hope that Titan doesn't go the way of Starcraft: Ghost.
Report: Next Blizzard MMO restarts development, pushed until 2016 [update]
VentureBeat is reporting via "a source familiar with the matter" that Blizzard Entertainment has reset development on its long-rumored post-World of Warcraft MMO, codenamed "Titan." The source says Blizzard had 100 people working on the project, but that number has been reduced to just 30, with those dismissed being put to work on other games. Titan never had an official release date, but VentureBeat claims it won't be ready to publish until 2016 at the earliest. Joystiq has also gained information on this development, with a source claiming the project "just wasn't up to polish." Stripped down to the core ideas, the game will now restart its process from the ground up. Blizzard is no stranger to long and laborious development schedules. Diablo 3 famously went through multiple redesigns over ten years of development, and StarCraft Ghost was "postponed" after years of work, then never seen again. Blizzard is gearing up to release a new digital card game named Hearthstone later this year, and then host a sold-out BlizzCon 2013 in November. Update: Zam (via Massively) reports Blizzard, when approached, responded with this statement: "We've always had a highly iterative development process, and the unannounced MMO is no exception. We've come to a point where we need to make some large design and technology changes to the game. We're using this opportunity to shift some of our resources to assist with other projects while the core team adapts our technology and tools to accommodate these new changes. Note that we haven't announced any dates for the MMO."
Rumor: Project Titan development reset?
According to Venturebeat the as-yet unannounced Project Titan has seen seventy or so developers reassigned to other projects and a slimmed down thirty person team remains on the project. MMO-Champion reported that sources indicated that the changes were made in part due to a desire to make significant technology changes to the project and that the rest of the developers are being moved to World of Warcraft, Blizzard All-Stars, the upcoming Diablo III expansion and Battle.net. Considering Titan hasn't even been announced yet, we're not sure what we can really make of this news. We've seen similar moves in the past with titles like Starcraft: Ghost which ended in cancellation, and even Warcraft III saw mid-stream technology updates that resulted in a very successful launch. At any rate, until any sort of announcement on what Titan actually is gets made, we'll just be over here playing World of Warcraft.
Rumor: Blizzard's Titan has fallen, won't be getting up until 2016 [Updated]
Are you looking forward to Titan? It's a bit odd, since the game hasn't had so much as a screenshot released yet, but we can understand it. If that's the case, though, we've got some bad news for you, as the project is rumored to have been completely restarted. According to an unnamed GamesBeat source, the project has had 70 people taken off its previously 100-strong workforce, with the title's release delayed until at least 2016 as a result. Those who have followed Blizzard Entertainment for a while will remember that the last project restarted more than once was the ill-fated Starcraft: Ghost, which doesn't bode well for the future of Titan. With World of Warcraft's subscription numbers in decline, it's possible that the company is moving in a different direction. No official statements have been issued regarding the development of Titan or any expected release window for the game. [Update: ZAM reports that Blizzard has responded to that site's queries with the following statement: "We've always had a highly iterative development process, and the unannounced MMO is no exception. We've come to a point where we need to make some large design and technology changes to the game. We're using this opportunity to shift some of our resources to assist with other projects while the core team adapts our technology and tools to accommodate these new changes. Note that we haven't announced any dates for the MMO."]
NASA creates the first topographic map of Titan, Saturn's largest moon
Scientists observing Saturn's moon Titan with NASA's Cassini spacecraft have boldly gone where no man has gone before -- visually, anyway. Using radar imagery collected from nine years of Cassini flybys, researchers were able to patch together the first global topographic map of Titan, published in the July 2013 issue of Icarus. Ralph Lorenz, a member of the Cassini radar team at Johns Hopkins, said, "Titan has so much interesting activity -- like flowing liquids and moving sand dunes -- but to understand these processes it's useful to know how the terrain slopes." In particular, understanding the moon's terrain can reveal a lot about its dynamic climate system. Like Earth, Titan's atmosphere is composed primarily of nitrogen, but the liquids and vapors on the moon's surface are made of methane and other organic chemicals integral to the creation of complex life. By studying the relationship between atmosphere and terrain, researchers hope to learn more about the evolution of life in its earliest stages, and inspire curious minds to turn their eyes toward Titan.
Eyes-on: University of Pennsylvania's TitanArm exoskeleton (video)
TitanArm already took home silver in a competition for senior projects at the University of Pennsylvania, and now the team behind it is visiting Orlando to compete in the Intel-sponsored Cornell Cup for embedded design. We stopped by the showroom and snagged a few minutes with the crew to take a look at their creation: an 18-pound, untethered, self-powered exoskeleton arm constructed for less than $2,000. To wield the contraption, users attach the cable-driven mechanical appendage to themselves with straps from a military-grade hiking backpack, and guide it with a thumbstick on a nunchuck-like controller. If a load needs to be held in place, the wearer can jab a button on the hand-held control to apply a brake. A Beagle Bone drives the logic for the setup, and it can stream data such as range of motion wirelessly to a computer. As for battery-life, they group says the upper-body suit has previously squeezed out over 24 hours of use without having to recharge.%Gallery-187514%
PSA: BlizzCon tickets on sale right about ... now [Update: Gone!]
Just a heads up: Tickets for this year's BlizzCon event in Anaheim, California, are going on sale in just a few minutes at 7pm Pacific. The tickets – which will likely sell out quickly – are priced at $175, and include a swag bag and admittance to the two day event beginning November 8.Tickets are on sale on from the official BlizzCon site.If you don't get tickets today, there's two more chances to do so. This Saturday, April 27, a second round of ticket sales will begin at 10am Pacific, and when that's done, all of the regular admission tickets will be gone. Your last chance, then, will be on May 1 at 7pm Pacific, when Blizzard will sell 200 tickets at $500 a piece for the Blizzcon Benefit Dinner, which includes full admission to the show and a charity event.Update: 29 minutes later, the first round of tickets is sold out. If you didn't get yours, you'll have to try again Saturday.
Respawn Entertainment trademarks 'Titan'
We may know a tiny, tiny bit more about the first game from Respawn Entertainment, the company formed by Jason West and Vince Zampella after the duo's famous firing from Infinity Ward and Activision. The studio has trademarked the word "Titan" for use in video games. Beyond this single word, presumably a title, all we've had to go on is a pair of blurry screenshots and one very close-up image of what appear to be a mouse and gun barrel.Given Zampella and West's involvement with Call of Duty – though West is no longer with the studio – it wouldn't be too surprising if the game ended up being a shooter. Whatever it is, Respawn and publisher Electronic Arts should finally be showing it off at E3 this summer.One cheeky note regarding Titan: That's also reportedly the code name for Blizzard's next MMO, a game belonging to Activision.
Titan supercomputer to be loaded with 'world's fastest' storage system
If you figured Titan's title of the world's most powerful supercomputer would give the folks at Oak Ridge National Laboratory reason to rest on their laurels, you'd be mistaken. The computer is set to have its fleet of 18,688 NVIDIA K20 GPUs and equal number of AMD Opteron processors paired with what's said to be the planet's speediest storage system, making its file setup six times faster and giving it three times more capacity. Dubbed Spider II, the new hardware will endow the number cruncher with a peak performance of 1.4 terabytes a second and 40 petabytes of storage spread across 20,000 disk drives. Behind the refresh are 36 of Datadirect Networks' SFA12K-40 systems, which each pack 1.12PB of capacity. For more on the herculean rig's upgrade, hit the jump for the press release.
Minimum: a free-to-play shooter from TimeGate [update]
Texas-based developer TimeGate Studios has announced that it's working on a new free-to-play, third-person match-based shooter called Minimum.Minimum boasts a simplistic look, and has you building a character up during each life, adding more and more power-ups to your weapons (ranging from ice-powered sniper rifles to flaming katanas) as you go. In Titan, the "signature" game mode according to the FAQ, players support two giant creatures fighting each other during the match.TimeGate also says it hopes to bring "everyone to the development table to influence how the game grows and changes." Minimum will be in closed alpha soon, and is set for a Steam release whenever it's ready.TimeGate is probably best known at the moment for its work on Aliens: Colonial Marines, but the company also made Section 8 and Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns in the past, so Minimum is coming from a substantial history of development experience for PC.Update: The game will be available through Steam's Early Access channel on April 16 in North America.
Last Week on Massively: LucasArts closes, Titan rumors, and more
Sometimes, you'd like to know that there are other MMOs out there, right? It's not all WoW, all the time! Our sister site Massively can provide you with everything you need to know about all of the other MMOs around -- past, present and future. Disney shutters LucasArts Following Disney's acquisition of Star Wars and its related companies and properties, gaming fans have wondered what might happen to developer LucasArts. Out of all of the possible scenarios, the worst has happened: Disney has stopped development in the studio and laid off its employees. Rumor: Titan might be a time-traveling, earthbound MMO Titan rumors are more common than water, but that doesn't make them any less fun to read. The latest rumor suggest Titan is set on Earth and makes heavy use of time travel. Diablo III's auction house 'really hurt the game' Remember that one time when a guy used Diablo III's real-money auction house to bank a cool $10,000? That apparently wasn't what Blizzard foresaw when creating and implementing the auction house. According to former Diablo III Game Director Jay Wilson, the auction house "really hurt the game." GDC 2013: James Ohlen on how F2P saved SWTOR Developers speak most candidly about their games and professions at GDC, and at GDC13, SWTOR's James Ohlen laid out exactly how the game's F2P transition ensured its survival. He also dispels many myths that have built up around the game, explaining exactly what costs so much money in game development -- and what doesn't cost much at all, relatively speaking. Jet Li: There's 'no good reason to debunk virtual gaming as a sport' Jet Li may be known for his martial arts prowess, but he's also an avid gamer according to an interview translation at MMO Culture. Li recently attended an Age of Wushu PvP tournament and had some interesting things to say about e-sports and the validity of video gaming as a sport in general. Massively's week in review Don't let WoW Insider do all of the talking when it comes to Massively's best content of the week. The Massively staff themselves have picked out what they think is the best content their site has to offer in their own weekly roundup.
